From [Ed Catmull’s talk](http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/inside-pixars-leadership/) at the [Economist Ideas conference](http://ideas.economist.com/):
> I do believe you want a vision, so you start off with a person who has a vision for a story. And we do things to try and protect that vision and its not easy to protect it, because they feel these pressures.
> One of the protections is the notion that they have the final say so. Now this is a very hard thing to say because we say we are filmmaker led. The reason its hard is if they can’t lead the team, we will actually remove the person from it.
> We will support the leader for as long and as hard as we can, but the thing we can not overcome is if they have lost the crew. It’s when the crew says we are not following that person. We say we are director led, which implies they make all the final decisions, [but] what it means to us is the director has to lead.. and the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say ‘we are not following’.
[This interview with Eagleman by the Guardian](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/apr/04/david-eagleman-40-afterlives) contains a lot of great bits, many which resonate with my recent thinking. Eagleman is the author of [Sum](http://futuryst.blogspot.com/2009/03/alternative-afterlives.html), which I greatly enjoyed.
> I’m using the afterlife as a backdrop against which to explore the joys and complexities of being human – it turns out that it’s a great lens with which to understand what matters to us.
This is similar to my philosophy on concept design–tell yourself (and others) that this is the “future” experience, when really that’s just a technique to help you think about what you wish things were like today.
> Every time you go into a book store, you find a lot of books written with certainty…I think what a life in science really teaches you is the vastness of our ignorance.
As I get older I feel like I “know” less and less. I always expected it to be the opposite, but this feels right.
> I think the first decade of this century is going to be remembered as a time of extremism. But, as Voltaire said, “uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position”.
I’ve often said that my job title is designer, but that what I’m paid to do is tolerate uncertainty. It’s uncomfortable and hard to do, but most important projects require a significant period of uncertainty and very few people are willing to endure that.
My new favorite artist. Selected projects include: copyrighting his mind, paintings by trees, a mobile ringtone based on John Cage’s 4’33”, a travel documentary for houseplants, and an antimatter bank.
That, folks, is divergent thinking.
Michael Beirut, partner at Pentagram, describes his *real* design process:
“When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem!”
As much as we like to tell ourselves (and others) about our robust, repeatable, formal design process, great work usually comes down to a little bit of magic.
“Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization. Imagination led Columbus to discover America. Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity. Imagination has given us the steam engine, the telephone, the talking-machine, and the automobile, for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities. So I believe that dreams–daydreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing–are likely to lead to the betterment of the world. The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to invent, and therefore to foster, civilization.” – [L. Frank Baum](http://www.iwise.com/gAHxh)
“Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care…The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.” – [The Science of Success](http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene)
It seems that if you hope to design things that cut to the heart of the human experience, you’re better off drawing inspiration from classical stories and literature than contemporary work. Something that remains relevant hundreds or thousands of years after its writing is a better foundation for meaningful work than the latest tech blog post.
Again: [read not the Times; read the Eternities](http://www.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=3640).
When I’m lazy, I get busy–my schedule fills up indiscriminately. When I’m busy, I know I’ve been lazy.
A mentor advised that “you have to continually fight off those predators that are trying to eat time away from your calendar.” A woman in [Choosing Simplicity](http://books.google.com/books?id=dF1y9zdTpegC) said that she [wrote “NO” on the top of every week’s listing](http://books.google.com/books?id=dF1y9zdTpegC&dq=choosing+simplicity&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=fRUpS8zUCYqCswOUjpXKDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=no%20top%20calendar&f=false) in her agenda so that she’d think hard before accepting something to do that day.
One technique [recommended by author Jim Collins](http://books.google.com/books?id=9Ogzl-3k1eoC&lpg=PP1&dq=good%20to%20great&pg=PA139#v=onepage&q=&f=true) for simplifying your schedule is to [create a “stop doing” list](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2025-jim-collins-and-the-stop-doing-list).
One year ago I wrote that to be innovative, [it’s sometimes more important what you don’t do than what you do](http://www.ryskamp.org/brain/?p=270). That extends even to removing things that no longer are working.
You have to make room for good things to happen to you.